Fundraising Track Materials

In this section you'll find materials and presentations from all sessions at the 2007 NTC that dealt with fundraising.

We've gathered presentations and handouts from every session at the NTC, and also have videocasts of the most popular sessions. Browse through the list of sessions below and click on the ones you're interested in for more information and materials.

 

Building Better Online Fundraising Campaigns: Practical Tactics for Raising More Money via Email

This session describes in detail - via several case studies - best practices for building and optimizing a successful online fundraising campaign. We’ll dissect several real fundraising emails and describe the specific techniques that made them successful. Along the way we’ll answer questions like these:

  • What are best practices for From and Subject lines to maximize open rates?
  • What is a hotspot and why is it valuable for driving click-thru’s?
  • How to develop an email message body that converts readers to donors?
  • What to include on a giving form to minimize drop-off and maximize revenue?
  • How to design Thank You pages and autoresponders for maximum effectiveness?
  • What metrics to use to track the success of your email fundraising campaigns?
  • How to optimize your fundraising emails after reviewing your campaign metrics?

Takeaways:

  1. Ten email fundraising tactics to make my next online fundraising campaign more successful
  2. The essential metrics to track to understand how your email fundraising campaigns are performing
  3. How to optimize your online fundraising campaigns using the tactics and metrics developed from this session

Speaker List:

  1. Mr. Jeff Patrick / Common Knowledge
  2. Jeff Regen / Defenders of Wildlife

Cross-Channel Fundraising Strategies

Integrating your online and offline fundraising campaigns can help you retain donors and raise more money. This session will walk you through various approaches, share results and best practices, and also address some of the challenges to successful integration.

 

Takeaways:

  1. Stats and campaigns that demonstrate real results. (Take these back and talk your team into trying it!)
  2. Nuts and bolts on planning, coordination, data management and evaluation
  3. Identifying and working through obstacles and challenges.

Speaker List:

  1. Ms. Betsy Harman / Harman Interactive
  2. Jeff Regen / Defenders of Wildlife
  3. Ms. Tanya Zumach

Session Materials:

  1. Session slides

Email…Still the Best Way to Raise Money (and Raise Eyebrows) Online!

Yep, you should be mobilizing your phones, socializing your networks, and flipping your funnel. Just don’t forget that your good old friend email is still the best way to raise money online. You can raise a healthy amount - thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars - if you approach email fundraising with a measure of intelligence, authenticity, and creativity. This session will deliver advice, insider tips, recommendations, and plenty of examples that show you exactly what to do, step by step, to raise substantial money with email. And, you'll probably have some fun a long the way.

 

Takeaways:

  1. Five strategies to raise (more) money with email
  2. Three campaigns you can STEAL and make your own
  3. One hysterical example of how NOT to raise money online

Speaker List:

  1. Madeline Stanionis / Donordigital

Session Materials:

  1. Session slides

Getting Started With Online Donation Tools: Smaller Organizations

Do you want to help your organization take donations online, but aren’t sure how? This session will tell you what you need to know in order to choose a tool and get started. We’ll touch on some of the strategic aspects of online donations, but our focus will be on the tactical: What online donation tools are available? How do they work? How do you know which one is right for your organization? We’ll close by looking more closely at some of the specific tools that are available.

 

Takeaways:

  1. How online donations work
  2. What tools are available, and how they compare
  3. Methods for evaluating your options and finding the right fit for you

Speaker List:

  1. Laura Quinn / Idealware

Session Materials:

  1. Session slides

Not Your Mother’s Online Fundraising Campaign

Email is SO yesterday. Well, it’ll probably be around for a few more years, but in terms of online fundraising, there are literally dozens of new strategies you can use to reach your stakeholders. In this session we’ll highlight some of the latest technologies and the circumstances under which they are most successful. We’ll bring up blogs, video appeals, keywords, text messaging and more.

Takeaways:

  1. A tour of the newest tools and strategies for online fundraising
  2. Tips and tricks for implementing these strategies
  3. Case studies from the sector

Speaker List:

  1. Peter Deitz
  2. Seth Mazow
  3. Chris Phillips
  4. Marc Sirkin / The International Rescue Committee

Session Materials:

  1. Session notes

Online Fundraising Throughout Your Organization

Every department in your organization is a wealth of knowledge about your stakeholders, interacting with hundreds or thousands of people on a regular basis. It’s in the long-term interest of your organization that the development staff know who most those people are, what motivates them, and how they’ve interacted with the organization. In this session, we’ll outline the benefits of sharing stakeholder data across departments, and break down the most common hurdles to making it happen.

 

Takeaways:

  1. Articulate the importance of an integrated approach to fundraising
  2. Technology tools that can facilitate sharing
  3. Organizational barriers to sharing and how to address them

Speaker List:

  1. Rusty Burwell / American Lung Association
  2. Rick Johnston

Session Materials:

  1. Session slides

The Long Tail of Online Giving

Only a few “name brand” nonprofits receive the highest volume of online donations. But they only represent a fraction of the total online giving. The rest are part of what Chris Anderson calls “The Long Tail,” the organizations that collectively make up the majority of online donation transactions. Surviving in the long tail takes a special set of skills – an ability to cultivate and keep passionate users around who are inspired by the niche you fill. In this session, we’ll explore the implications of the “Long Tail” phenomenon and the strategies and tactics that will help you succeed in its wake.

 

Takeaways:

  1. Definition of the “Long Tail” concept
  2. Understanding of why this concept is so suited to the nonprofit sector
  3. How to apply the concept to your fundraising strategy for increased results

Speaker List:

  1. Katya Andresen / Network for Good powered by Groundspring
  2. Mr. Bill Strathmann / Network for Good powered by Groundspring

Session Materials:

  1. Session slides
  2. Session slides: SixDegrees
  3. Session slides: Chip In
  4. The Young and The Generous: A Study of $100 Million in Online Giving to 23,000 Charities
  5. Tips for Successful Person to Person Fundraising With Online Charity Badges